Today I'm going to talk about attributes and crew because they overlap quite a bit.
Currently there are 6 "attributes" for your spaceship crew: Tactical, Helmsman, Structural, Engineering, Computers, and Captain. Each time you level up you get a few (right now 5) attribute points to allocate however you want. This essentially represents your generic, unnamed crew.
Tactical increases your damage and is the required attribute for weapons.
Helmsman increases your defense and is the required attribute for thrusters, engines, and defenses.
Structural increases your structure hit points and is the required attribute for armor, damage control, and structure related components.
Engineering increases your energy and is the required attribute for batteries, engines, power collectors, power plants, and shields.
Computers increases your attack and is the required attribute for computers, ECCM, jammers, radars, and sensors.
Captain unlocks hulls.
This is going to end up being different than fantasy games. In a fantasy game you usually have a specific class and then you focus on one or a few attributes that are best for that class and for the most part ignore the rest. For example a warrior would usually focus on strength, vitality, and dexterity while a mage would focus on intelligence. In this game while you might focus on a few attributes, you probably won't be able to ignore any of them.
You can also have named crew that further boost your "attributes". These crew are basically your officers. Since they are in addition to your normal crew you must have somewhere to put them so to be working they take up an equipment slot. You can have standby crew in your normal inventory but you won't be getting any active benefit from them. Also since these are actual beings not just cargo you can't just store them in a stash somewhere. They must be in your ship, so one way or another they are taking up a slot. This is going to make them a bit harder to get a hold of then ship components.
Another nice thing about named crew is that they will likely "level up" occasionally. This probably won't keep up with your leveling up pace, but will be a nice bonus here and there.
So how can you find new crew? You can recruit them by solving quests for them. You will be able to hire them. You will even be able to rescue them from life pods or crash landings on planets.
Unlike our previous games there probably won't be too many things that boost your attributes. Right now it is limited to your allocated attribute points, crew, and a few crew related ship components (artificial gravity, atmosphere, holo units, etc). This will likely make point allocation and crew fairly important.
